


Lets be all poetic and lose our minds together

by griffinhaught



Category: The 100 (TV), The Last of Us
Genre: Angry Clarke, Angst, F/F, Protective Lexa, evil fungus
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-11-02 02:42:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20594933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/griffinhaught/pseuds/griffinhaught
Summary: Clarke Griffin doesn't want a higher purpose. She just wants to smuggle her drugs in peace. Lexa insists.The Last Of Us AU that literally all of you wouldn't shut up about.





	Lets be all poetic and lose our minds together

You could ask her what band is playing on the other end of this 45. It’s hazy static backdrops as a white noise that doesn’t completely drown out the actual tune that the slightly bent needle reads lazily.

You could ask her why the twangs of the acoustic guitar or the violin or cello or viola strings backing the melodic plucking make her think of an open country window that lets a yellow, morning light shine through beside a steady breeze.

You could even ask her how she came into its possession, seeing as this turntable and the short stack of six or seven records, only partially coated in a weird brown mold, have been a near-permanent fixture in this ramshackle, hole-in-the-wall for the majority of the time Clarke Griffin has lived here.

And no, it’s not _that_ kind of mold.

Just your run-of-the-mill, sporous, black brand that would have scared young mothers into spending thousands on contractors and fumigators in the old world.

Scared senseless by the looming threat that those old mesothelioma civil-suit commercials had been right all along. That their little babes or their 80-year-old grandpas or even their pet labradoodles would catch some sort of indeterminant black lung.

One representative of the kind of fear Clarke thinks she might even miss from Before.

Back then, the hypothetical Grandpa Joe or Tom or John down the street—who isn’t really anyone’s grandfather, just a rickety old thing who’s accrued the title by time’s judgment—well, he might have gone 20 or 30 or even 40 years living on in a house, one he probably built himself with his brothers before they died in some long-ago war, before seeing the respiratory effects that _that _fungus might have had.

That was the kind of mold, no, the kind of _fear_ that would permit years to be lived out before its implications made themselves apparent.

If they ever did at all.

But that kind of fear died when the world did. It was the same day a new sort sprung out from the cracks and dark spaces and blew in on a wind that left no family unaffected or global health official unmoored.

A new sort that worked quickly and without pause.

The kind that tattered at your fraying edges right before disbelieving eyes, smiling cheekily at you while it forced you to watch as it stole all of hope’s last breath.

Or, less delicately, as it turned any good thing you’ve ever been lucky enough to happen across in this life, anything alive, into something bad.

Something rotten and putrid.

Clarke knows this fear well. And I could say it’s better than anyone, but that would be gratuitous hyperbole.

This kind of fear is something any old schmuck that’s had the displeasure of surviving into this new—well—this new state of affairs, would know. It’s a fate she shares with any other daughter, brother, father, orphaned German Shephard.

So yeah. You could ask her.

But seeing as nothing seems to be lulling her out of her mid-afternoon doze, not the record-player’s intermittent skips, not the raid-drill sirens that sound off in her sanctioned district, and certainly not Murphy’s reflexive shouts that bleed through the criminally thin walls of her building, it’s unlikely she’d answer.

Her eyes are shut nice and tight and her bed is so damn comfortable, but _fuck_, she’d prefer it if Murphy could do her the goddamn favor of shutting the hell up, _please and thank you. _

Her snooze had gone fairly uninterrupted, that is, until the telltale crashing noises and the shattering of plates or ceramic dishware (ones that were most likely already damaged to begin with) shook her more alert.

She isn’t quite sure how long it’ll be until her resolve cracks and she allows herself the beating he’s been earning since this morning’s clockwork familial skirmish broke out across the hall. She thinks it’ll be fairly soon seeing as her fists clench knuckle-white, almost itchy for permission.

But then the sirens shriek louder in their familiar warning just outside her broken window.

She welcomes the piercing sound, because in that moment, Clarke thinks there just might be a God. Only the grace of a higher power would drown out Murphy and his bastard father a mere hair’s breadth before her resolve had snapped and she accidentally murdered her neighbor.

_Someone’s watching out for you, Murphy. _

She rises to a sitting position when the ebb and flow of the raid alarms dies away in the choking summer smog, not yet realizing how her body sways.

It’s a quiet sway and her eyes are still closed and she doesn’t plan on opening them anytime soon because she can finally hear the melodic twang and _only _the melodic twang scratching out of the record player that sits lonely and crooked at the foot of her mattress.

The sound is no longer harmonized with Murphy’s angry retorts or the now, just barely audible, raven’s wail that softly sounds with yet another blockwide announcement of quarantine kills. It is the third fire-line this week.

She swallows hard knowing it won’t be the last.

A knock at her door shakes the door in its hinges. A bit of dust is thrown to dance into the light that cuts through the windows. Clarke glances up in waiting.

Her stomach drops, almost audibly, when she hears _that _voice call out sure but with a sliver of desperation that hints of some kind of grave importance.

“Clarke, open up, we need to talk.”

She leans forward and hangs her head, hunching over with her elbows digging into the muscular tops of her thighs, her grey Henley shirt stretching against her back as the curve of her spine attempts to release tension that the voice put there.

She closes her eyes, wishing the voice away. Her eyes clench tight and hopeful and she instinctively tethers her fingertips of her right hand to the cool and comforting scratched chrome of the watch wrapped gently around her left wrist. She twists it lightly, as her blonde hair hangs down over her face, an extension of her neck bent forward. Almost praying-like.

_Please._

_Go away._

She doesn’t want to say it out loud. That would be engaging. It would be inviting yet another confrontation and she had sworn she was done with those. She had been clear. _No more._

She resigns herself to laying back on the bed, her heart beating quick. She hopes the woman on the other side can’t hear it.

“Clarke, Goddamnit open up, I know you’re in there,” she sounds rushed, like something is pulling her away. She sounds like she’s just as regretful about standing outside that stupid door as Clarke feels trapped on this side. Well, protected more like. “Shit, I’ve got to go, Clarke, but damnit we need to talk. This can’t wait much longer.” She’s giving up for now, Clarke can hear it. Is soothed by it. _Good, _she thinks_._

A frustrated sigh is practically felt through the door’s draft, followed by soft footsteps fading. With them goes the last of Clarke’s will to remain conscious. She falls to sleep against a flattened pillow, clutching her left wrist to her chest.


End file.
